End of the roses . . . Photo: Benson Kua / flickr CC
End of the roses, Quaker meeting
A prose poem by Susan Vickerman
Her shadow on the carpet paler and paler, although no cloud has come over the sun; her hair thinner even than an hour ago when she was wheeled in. Although I did feel something coming over as I was arriving. It was the sky itself, a heavy silence, then this room inhaling and exhaling, this frail Quaker like a bird gone back to featherless or a fledgling still blinded by mucus, tiny lungs inflating and deflating under brittle chest-bones, tiny lungs of a little bald chick. The hour ticking towards its end.
These roses on the table are vintage-looking, cut from the Meeting House’s garden, their pinkness not as bright as when they were out in the full glare of the day. Tired may be the word. No longer buzzed at by excited bees. No longer velvety but thin-skinned, yellow at the edges, veiny. Some petals have typed off; they have desiccated, dropped like peelings onto the table-top and the carpet. One falls in front of me – it must have been loosening all the time I have been here but I do not know it is going to fall until it falls. When it falls, it falls reluctantly.
With cut flowers there’s this inevitability. But I always clear up the fallen petals, hoping the arrangement will keep for another day, and another.
